Maxine Kumin: “My bones drank water; water fell through all my doors.”
Today's poet is Maxine Kumin, Pulitzer Prize winner, trailblazer, titan—and, briefly, my college professor
When she was a girl, Maxine Kumin thought she would be an Olympic swimmer. Her classic poem “Morning Swim” (quoted above) is about waking up in the pre-dawn hours to swim in the lake at summer camp. (Full poem here at the Library of Congress.)
While she was active her entire life—from years of swimming to decades of keeping horses on her farm—she ultimately did not become a swimmer. She became a poet.
And a highly-lauded one at that.
In 1973, Kumin won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, an event which took her from the world of obscure housewife to the world of poetry overnight—her name suddenly recognizable and putting her in “the poetry business.” 1
In the biography section of her website, it describes the transition like this:
Maxine struggled all her career to balance the conventional duties of a housewife and mother with her desire to fan the intellectual flame and excel as a writer. When she began her career the women’s movement did not yet exist, so she had few role models to rely on. After her star rose and she began teaching and landed the post of Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1981-1982 (later renamed Poet Laureate of the U.S.), she promoted the work of her fellow female poets and mentored young and rising female poets at every opportunity.
Kumin was a trailblazer, who lived through decades of change. Her very first published poem in 1953 had to be accompanied by a note from her husband’s boss verifying that she had truly written it. 2 During her tenure at the Library of Congress, from 1981 to 1982, she held weekly open-door, brown-bag lunches for women writers and she hosted many female poets for monthly readings. 3
In 1998, she and Carolyn Kizer resigned from their chancellor posts at the American Academy of Poets to protest the “absence of blacks and other minority groups on the academy’s board of chancellors.” 4 Their actions led to Lucille Clifton and Yusef Komunyakaa both being named chancellors, the first Black poets to hold the post. (We wrote about Clifton on Poetry Buds a few days ago here.)
I first learned about Maxine Kumin when she was a visiting professor at my college in the late 1990’s. I can still remember the grass tickling my legs as we students sat scattered on the lawn, her favorite class venue. I learned some important lessons5 that semester—lessons that helped shock some maturity into my teenage poetry, fueled as it was by hormones, wanderlust, and the pre-emo ghosts of grunge music.
At that time, I saw her with a haze of “poet” about her. She was so different from me; she lived across a vocational river I would probably never cross. A capital P Poet.
(Although she did not wear Victorian clothes, as my teenage self had conjured up; no, she wore the practical all-weather outfits of a New Englander, looking very much like she’d stepped out of an Eddie Bauer catalog, or arrived at class directly after a jaunt to the barn to give a favorite horse an apple.)
Many describe Kumin as a New England poet (she was sometimes called “Roberta Frost”), and indeed she often wrote about the natural world—from the rescued horses and cheeky squirrels on her farm, to the cycles of death and decay in nature, to the essential role of manure—but she also didn’t want to be known only as a pastoral poet.6
Others see her as a kind of transitional poet, in both life (as described above) and work (a tension between the old ways and the new ways, between rigid form and free verse.) I personally always liked the way that slang words and idioms were woven into her tight stanzas, little pellets of verbal surprise. She also often talked about the “freedom” that she found by writing inside form. In a humorous moment at a Seattle Arts and Lectures event in 2005, she joked: 7
When I’m working in free verse, and I do write a fair amount of it, I feel as though I’m somewhere in Indiana, you know, with a 360-degree horizon, and my eyelids have been pinned open and I can’t blink. And that’s much harder to handle than say writing in iambic tetrameter.
Others point to her close friendship with Anne Sexton, rock star of the Confessional Poets (along with Sylvia Plath), but Kumin’s work was rarely confessional.
Kumin and Sexton met at a poetry workshop at an adult learning center in Boston—and became so close that they had extra phone lines installed in their houses! As they spent their days chasing kids and cooking meals, they would leave the phone line open for hours, reading poems back and forth—a kind of writing club, a dream incubator, a poetry workshop of two. 8
One of my favorite of Kumin’s poems comes from this friendship. The poem is “How It Is” and was written after Sexton’s suicide (an event that echoed through Kumin’s life and appears in other poems as well). It begins:
"Shall I say how it is in your clothes? A month after your death, I wear your blue jacket. The dog at the center of my life recognizes you've come to visit, he's ecstatic."
That dog! The heart tugs at his misplaced joy.
And then later in the poem, some of the emotional impact:
"In my heart, a scatter like milkweed, a flinging from the pods of the soul."
And then this zinger:
"My skin presses your old outline."
(Even now, decades after first reading this poem, I sometimes shrug into a jacket, feel the sleeves settle over my shoulders, and wonder what it would feel like to tuck my body into the shape of someone’s absence…)
She also writes about how she wishes she could “unwind” the day of Sexton’s death like a “home movie”—the day ticking backwards—the sandwiches un-making themselves—until the tragedy reverses.
Read the full poem here.
I recently purchased her very last book, And Short the Season (2014), and reading it brought me full circle back to the time I met her in college.
In part 7 of “Sonnets Uncorseted,” she reflects back on her early years—being a young female poet, trying to break into the mostly male world of poetry—all while juggling the many demands of domestic life:
Terrified of writing domestic poems, poems pungent with motherhood, anathema to the prevailing clique of male poobahs, somehow I balanced teaching freshman comp half-time with kids, meals, pets, errands, spouse. I wrote in secret, read drafts on the phone with another restless mother, Anne Sexton, and poco a poco our poems filled up the house.
(From “Sonnets Uncorseted,” in And Short the Season (2014).)
I write this post now from a similar perch—mother, meal-maker, pet-carer, errand-runner—also wishing for a house filled with poems.
When I sat on that grassy field in college, I had yet to realize the complexity of what lay ahead—the many component pieces that make up a woman’s life.
More, please
Read about her life and work, with a sampling of her poems here. (The Poetry Foundation)
An amazing essay written by poet Eleanor Wilner in The Hudson Review here. (I easily could have put this link at the beginning of this post with a tag, “Skip everything I write here, and go directly to this love song for Kumin. Run, don’t walk!”)
A great (written) interview with Maxine Kumin is here, at the Harvard Review Online.
An audio clip of Kumin reading “How It Is” here:
A short audio episode of Essential American Poets, with a brief introduction to Kumin’s life and work, and then readings by the poet herself here:
A great podcast that includes a poetry reading, followed by a Q&A session, held by Seattle Arts and Lectures. I enjoyed listening to both the reading and the Q&A, and the audience seems to be having fun. I wish I’d been there. Also available here:
How about you? Have you heard of Maxine Kumin? Do you have a favorite poem?
See you tomorrow with another poet!
Jenny
From the biography section of her website and also The Pawnbroker’s Daughter: A Memoir, W.W. Norton, 2015, p. 131.
From this article: “I must add this incredible detail; my husband was required to provide a letter from his employer certifying that my poem was original. This is not as far-fetched as it sounds today. In the fifties, women, along with people of color, were still thought to be intellectually inferior, mere appendages in the world of belles lettres.” The author lists the quote as coming from Kumin’s last autobiographical essay, published in 2012 in The Georgia Review, “Metamorphosis: From Light Verse to the Poetry of Witness,” and also included in The Pawnbroker’s Daughter: A Memoir, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
From an incredible essay written by Kumin herself about her tenure at the Library of Congress. Part of the Poetry and Literature Center’s “Poetry of American History Series” (2012-2014).
From this article in the New York Times.
I hope to write more about some of those lessons soon!
She mentions this at this Seattle Arts and Lectures event. In the description of the event, it’s written: “Often reflecting the dailiness of life and death on her New Hampshire horse farm, her powers lay in the unsentimental way she translated personal experience into resonant verse. ‘The paradoxical freedom of working in form…” as she says in this reading, is that it “gives you permission to say the hard truths.’”
Their friendship is documented in many places; I love how she talks about it during the Seattle Arts and Lectures event (at about the 1-hour and 3-minute mark). The whole section is lovely, and I love this one insight about the added phone line, “We used it (the phone) so extensively that sometimes when we saw each other and would look at the poem in process on the page, one of us would say to the other, ‘So this is what it looks like!’ because we had gotten so used to hearing it. And it’s a very good way to train your ear, I must say, to listen to drafts on the phone.”